Showing results for "Crow" in Cultural & Regional

The Strange Career of Jim Crow is one of the great works of Southern history. Indeed, the book actually helped shape that history. Published in 1955, a year after the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ordered schools desegregated, Strange Career was cited so often to counter arguments for segregation that Martin Luther King, Jr. called it "the historical Bible of the civil rights movement." The book offers a clear and illuminating analysis of the history of Jim Crow laws, presenting evidence that segregation in the South dated only to the 1890s.

A mixed-race orphan, Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina before escaping to New York, where she attended Hunter College and became a labor activist in the 1930s. When she applied to graduate school at the University of North Carolina, where her white great-great-grandfather had been a trustee, she was rejected because of her race. She went on to graduate first in her class at Howard Law School, only to be rejected for graduate study again at Harvard University this time on account of her sex. Undaunted, Murray forged a singular career in the law.

Caliph Washington's life was never supposed to matter. As a Black teenager from the vice-ridden city of Bessemer, Alabama, Washington was wrongfully convicted of killing an Alabama policeman in 1957. Sentenced to death, he came within minutes of the electric chair - nearly a dozen times. A Kafka-esque legal odyssey in which Washington's original conviction was overturned three times before he was finally released in 1972, his story is the kind that pervades the history of American justice.

Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism is the memoir of an African American woman who grew up privileged and educated in the restricted culture of the American South in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite Jim Crow laws that affected where she lived, how she was educated, and what civil rights she would be denied, Lloyd would become one of the first African American women to be the top editor of a mainstream daily newspaper. Her memoir is a window on the intersection of race, gender, culture, and the media’s role in our uniquely American experiment in democracy.

Dad was many things. He was a business owner, a brick mason, a husband, and a father. He was also illiterate. My dad grew up biracial in the Jim Crow South during the early 1930s, where he struggled to find his identity in a world where he was too Black to be White and too White to be Black. In Mixed Bloodlines, Octavia Yvonne Webb picks up the mantle of her father’s story, exploring the seemingly insurmountable injustices he suffered as a child of mixed race growing up in a racially separated world.